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Edited on Thu Dec-22-05 04:23 PM by welshTerrier2
it is very easy, especially with bush in the WH, to view both politics and government in a negative way ... to be sure, perhaps these institutions are nothing more than extensions of who we are as individuals, i.e., needy and greedy human beings ...
perhaps those who seek power do so for selfish reasons ... and perhaps the institutions that support their rise to power do so for selfish reasons as well ...
but every now and then, sprinkled in among the dark and cynical, there is an idealist ... i think we must do all we can to identify them and support them ... it would make their task all the more difficult if we, within ourselves, came to believe that all politics and all governments are corrupt by definition ...
government need not only concern itself with providing comforts against our insecurities ... warning us of the dangers we face, when they are legitimate dangers and not a sales pitch to relinquish our liberties and our own vigilance, is sometimes an appropriate function for government ... but good governance requires so much more ... good governance requires leadership; not just leadership out of harms way but leadership that calls us to a higher vision of who we are as a society ... there's been precious little of that ...
it's important for those of us who remain awake to guard our idealism and our optimism very carefully ... we should never allow the darkness we see embodied in "the bad ones" to alienate us from institutions that could be called upon to serve "what could be" ... to be cynical and skeptical against the men who control today's levers of power is prudent; to paint the stains they leave behind with too broad a brush across our democratic institutions would be folly ...
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